


beLIEve.

by Kaesteranya



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-04
Updated: 2009-09-04
Packaged: 2017-10-18 23:32:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/194488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kaesteranya/pseuds/Kaesteranya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This one explores the possibility of what the life of Hibari Kyouya might have been like, if Byakuran had found him first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	beLIEve.

**Picturesque.**  


Imagine this.

You’re standing, standing tall in your well-pressed, perfectly tailored Italian suit, with the Vongola Cloud Guardian ring on the finger where the Gesso Cloud Guardian ring ought to be, staring at the faces of the people you’ve betrayed.

Only you’re not just standing anywhere. You’re right smack in the heart of what stopped being your headquarters some five minutes ago, at one end of the long corridor connecting two parts of the base together. That Sawada kid from the past is on the other end, surrounded by his friends, looking at you with those big, brown eyes and a mouth that’s asking why without ever really saying anything at all. His friends, they’ve got their weapons out, but maybe they don’t need weapons, not with the way they’re all trying to kill you with a look.

There’s a gap between that sushi chef’s whelp and the loud boxer brat – they probably didn’t mean for that to happen, but it’s there.

You’d fill that space in if you were someone else, picturing what it would be like if you were the bad guy looking at yourself ten years back, all pouty lips and flashing tonfa and a heavy ring on a heavy chain hanging from your neck.

You feel lighter somehow, like something’s been lifted right off of your shoulders. It must be because the ring’s on your finger, and you’re not lying through your teeth anymore.

It’s not about what’s right. It’s about doing what you’ve been built to do.

For better or for worse.

Until death do you part.

“Hibari-san.”

Sawada, see, he’s got this amazing talent where he can say a million and one things with just one word. You’ve seen him do it before, you know, before you shoved the edge of your tonfa against his face and moved in close, to plug several bullets right into his belly.

You’re wearing the same suit that you killed his future self in, the one that his blood and a bit of his guts splattered all over and idly, you wonder what they’ll think if you told them that, right here, right now.

A heartbeat later and you decide that it’s better to not say anything at all.

“Please step back, Tenth! Let me handle him.”

Your amusement over Gokudera Hayato barking out more nonsense is enough to pierce through the noise in your head and shake you out of your lethargy. If you were someone else, you’d thank him for that.

“I am not here to kill you.”

“Then what ARE you gonna do, huh?! Tenth, we should—”

“Wait.”

  
There it is again. One word, one look, absolute clarity.

“Hibari-san, please step aside. We don’t have much time.”

“Which is exactly why you should not be wasting it here.”

And it is only too easy, this quiet betrayal in the form of you reaching into your coat and pulling out two things. The first you toss in their direction. The second you hold in your hand as you press the big bright red button on it.

“I have just called security. Leave, and use that keycard on the elevator down the hall. It will take you right where you want to go. No detours. No traps.”

“What sick game are you playing with us—”

Apparently, Yamamoto Takeshi’s hand on Gokudera Hayato’s shoulder is enough to shut him up. You’re almost grateful, but that means looking into Sawada’s eyes. He’s smiling at you now, accepting it all so easily, without questioning a thing.

You still remember exactly how heavy his corpse was, lying between your hands.

“Hibari-san, come with us!”

The din of approaching footsteps saves you the trouble of answering him, and the security detail arrives, right on cue. When their commander asks for orders, you take his head off with a roundhouse kick. The rest fall like Dominos, and in the rain of bodies, bullets and screams, you see the Sawada Tsunayoshi of the past turning back just as his company’s moving off, turning back to meet your eyes.

He looks sad, and you want to tell him not to pity you but breaking another gunman’s spine is so much more interesting.

“I’m coming back for you.”

The door shuts in his face. You brandish your tonfa and deflect another barrage of bullets.

  


***

  
Now, imagine this.

Six hours later you’ve just heard Zakuro choke on his own blood and that’s a good thing, because you’re kind of tired of kicking his ribcage into his heart. You back off, spit out a tooth, try to wipe your face clean with the back of your sleeve and just end up smearing some brain bits across your cheek. Then you cough, and hell, there’s blood coming up into _your_ mouth.

Fancy that. You’re twenty-five and you’re dying.

Idly, you wonder why it did not happen sooner.

When you stumble, you think, at first, that maybe they’re doing that weird shifting rooms thing with the base again (Byakuran had it installed everywhere, the crazy bastard), but then you realize that no, nothing’s moving, your legs are just giving out. Either way, you’re on the floor, joining your tonfa and your boxes where you dropped them, sitting in a room with a pile of dead guys topped by three out of six Funeral Wreaths.

The fourth and fifth ones should be fighting off the Vongola by now, if they’re not already dead.

The sixth one is supposed to be you.

When you pull your pack out, you realize that there’s a stick left. Just one, measly, half-bent cig.

It could be worse: your lighter could be missing.

Maybe that’s poetic somehow, but you’ve never been a fan of fancy words.

You’re on your second drag when your mind starts to wander.

Two drags after that, you start remembering everything.

 **Foundations.**

  
There’s not a lot to say about the first five years of your life, really. You never found out who your father was, and the last image you have of your mother is the way she looked at you as she sent you off with the guys in shades and suits. She had the face that she wore whenever she was taking out the trash.

After that, you don’t remember much. They always kept you were it was dark, see, and when it’s dark everything else – all the smells, all the tactile sensations – are usually vivid enough to overwhelm anyone, even someone like yourself.

You never come to like it, nor do you ever forget. You just learn to endure everything: the dirty underwear, the handcuffs, the drugs, the sticky sheets, the sweat, the semen, the hands and the eyes.

Then you learn to lock yourself up somewhere in your head and ignore and ignore and ignore until it’s over.

You’re seven when they abandon you, but you like to think that you just succeeded in running away and maybe they forgot to come after you. There are a hell lot of tiny little streets in Amsterdam, between all those weird-looking houses; it’s easy to get lost in them.

It’s easy to fall flat on your face by the dumpster and curl up and die without anyone ever noticing.

And that is when _he_ comes along.

Byakuran, prince of the Gesso Family, White King of the Millefiore.

Byakuran, your one and only.

For better or for worse.

Until death do you part.

  
Only he’s not Byakuran yet because you’re still seven years old and so beaten up and worn down that you can’t even remember your own name. He’s a shadow in the rain first, then the sound of footsteps, then—

“Well, well, well.”

Hands reaching out, arms holding you close, hot, dry fingers on your cold, wet cheek.

“What do we have here?”

Even in the rain-stained haloes of the street lamps and odd shadows of a wet afternoon, you can see that he is smiling.

  


***

Later on, in bits and pieces during your journey together, he’ll tell you about your first night, filling in the details where there are none for you to remember. He’ll tell you about the car ride, with him in the back and you bundled up in his arms and how you were so cute, cuter than a real kitten with your scruffy hair and slanted eyes and tiny little body. He’ll describe the way you looked, all dirt where there weren’t any bruises and bruises where there wasn’t any dirt.

He will _not_ tell about how the older Gesso disapproved of you and how Byakuran smiled and nodded through all the “talks” but didn’t listen, how it drove yet another wedge between father and son that never disappeared up until the old man’s death. You find that out on your own. You’ve always been good at watching and listening.

Now let’s go into what you _do_ remember: waking up in a finely furnished room, lying on an impossibly soft bed and surrounded by the sweetest smelling pillows. You’re wearing clothes that hardly fit you, and every injury you have has been patched up and attended to.

 _He_ is sitting on the chair by the bed, chin on one hand, watching you with those strange-colored eyes: violet, like the flower. His whole face seems to light up the moment he realizes you’re awake, and he bends forward, to plant a kiss right on your forehead.

“Good morning, _gattino_.”

He’s not Byakuran yet, because you’re only seven years old and you’ve forgotten who you are but maybe – just maybe – he’s a few steps away from becoming your god.

 **Hiding.**

  
You’re nine years old when you make your first kill for him.

In retrospect, it might have never happened. For the next two years after your arrival in the Gesso household, you’re the tiny little shadow following the young master everywhere, wearing his hand-me-downs, letting no one touch you without a fight. It’s not long before the household help takes to leaving things for you rather than attempting to give them to you, and it isn’t long before they stop talking to you altogether – they course their concerns over your reprehensible behavior to the young master, who only smiles and makes off-hand comments about how cute his pet is.

You might as well not exist in the estate, because you have nothing to call your own: you wear his clothes, sleep on his floor, eat off of his plate. Sometimes, even he seems to forget that you’re there, preferring, instead, to go off on “business” or chat with the other young ladies and mafiosos his age, and this upsets your little heart more than you’ll ever admit.

Since you hate feeling upset much like you hate feeling anything, you walk into the boss’ office one late evening, an hour after he’s come home from a business engagement that was actually little else beyond a session of cards and a whole lot of drinking. You walk in while the old man’s dozing off at his desk, pick the paperweight up (the heavy one made of solid gold) and hit his head again, and again, and again. You keep swinging it at him even after you hear a sound less like the thud of a heavy object against a soft one and more like a baseball bat smashing a watermelon open. You keep swinging it at him, until his desk and all the papers on it are drenched in the blood and bits from his brain.

When his right hand man walks in and finds you turning the back of his employer’s head into pink pulp with a whole lot of hair, you take the gun from the top drawer on the left and put a bullet through his eye. He gets you in the arm before he goes down, but it does not matter. Once he falls silent, you go back to mashing up the old Gesso fart’s brain.

Later on, you’ll tell yourself that you just wanted Byakuran to notice you because you’re an arrogant bastard. You were as proud and as fickle then as you are now, now that you’re twenty-five years old and quite possibly bleeding out/breathing out /coughing out the rest of your life among corpses.

In retrospect, though, maybe you did it because, in your own seriously fucked up and all-consuming way, you loved him.

***

You’re out in the garden the morning after the kill, slinking among the ancient trees shrouding the forking paths that lead both nowhere and to the Gesso estate. You ignore the well-beaten path, as always, and the butterflies, as always: you step into the tiny little forests instead, hunting down tiny little song birds.

You dreamt of blood the night before that moment: of its scent, its consistency, its taste, its color and the way it looked against the pale skin of your own two hands. You’re seeing it still, right over your eyes like some sort of weird crimson gauze as you step out from the bushes, to prod at one of the birds you’ve killed with the sharp end of a stick.

When you pierce the bird’s breast through and watch a tiny little crimson bead form around it, it excites you so much that it’s easy to forget the way your arm’s still hurting from the bullet wound you got in the old Gesso’s office, and a whole lot more difficult to breathe.

 _“Gattino.”_

You start at the sound of his voice; you spin around, fully intending to trade your surprise in for annoyance over being so rudely interrupted, and you end up staring at him instead, drinking up the sight of his figure in a cut suit of the finest material and his best pair of shoes, haloed against spots of sunlight and the shadows of leaves. He’s twining his hand about one of the vines hanging down from the canopy of trees, long fingers tangling among petals and stem and leaves. He’s smiling at you, and, for the first time since you met, looking _at_ you rather than _through_ you.

“You always sneak up on me,” you say, in an attempt to disguise the fact that you were staring.

“You’re just not good enough to sense my coming yet, then, hmm?” he chimes in return, with a lazy little smile and eyes that tell you that he knows _exactly_ what you were looking at and why.

  
“I’ll get good enough someday.”

“Oh? Will you?”

You remember, and rather abruptly, that you’re supposed to be angry with him. You turn away with a hot look and a tiny little huff, moving deeper into the garden.

When he follows you, you tell yourself that you’re upset rather than happy.

“Did you sleep well last night?”

“No.”

“Have you eaten breakfast?”

“Not hungry.”

“How many birds did you kill this time?”

“Hardly enough.”

“Were you the one who killed father last night?”

And just like that, with just a few words wielded with pinpoint precision, Byakuran has taken your heart and lodged it into your throat.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

A soft hum, the sound of footsteps and the snap of a stem.

“Don’t lie to me, hmm? It’s so disheartening when you do.”

“I’m not lying.”

“Was father so troublesome to you?”

“I already told you, I didn’t do it.”

 _“Gattino.”_

There’s ice lining his voice, stopping your heart, freezing you in place. His footsteps make you wince; the feel of him stopping right behind you, right up into your space, makes you tremble. His fingers, as they curl around your injured arm and dig into its wound, make you wish you were dead.

“Turn around,” he says right into your ear, and you obey. When you dare to look up, you see him smiling again, and you remember, once more, how to breathe.

  


***

“You’ve made a mess of your clothes, you know,” Byakuran tells you later, when you’re holed up together in the greenhouse and he’s dabbing at the wound on your arm. When you scoff at him he reaches out to pinch your nose and you bat him away and rub at it. When he laughs, your cheeks heat up, and you speak up in order to distract yourself.

“Will it be a problem, him being dead?”

“No.”

He turns away to patch up your arm, and you’re almost relieved to have the attention of the sun turned away from you, for once. Then he speaks again and you feel vaguely like you’re burning alive.

“Say, _gattino_ …”

“Eh?”

“I never did give you a name.”

He’s touching your face, dragging the pads of two pale fingers across your cheek, and you feel their weight just as much as the weight of his words. You were moving to his rhythm then just as much as you were until you betrayed him, shifting, like liquid, down the many little paths he carved out for you with the knives of his smile and the tiny little lies from his lips.

“I think I’ll call you Amadeo. It suits you, you know.”

‘Love of god’. Then, even now, you understood and hated the irony of it.

“I don’t believe in any god.”

A small, silver laugh. He’s looming close again, and when he talks, he does so right over your lips.

“Shh, _gattino_. You believe in me, don’t you?”

“…You’re not a god.”

“Not a god, perhaps. Simply yours.”

His hand slips away from you as he turns and stands up. You feel, vaguely, like you’ve lost something.

“Come now. We’ll be late for the funeral.”

  


***

A week after he buries your father six feet under, Byakuran buys you things and packs your bags and sends you off to live in Japan, in some backwater town named for the green fields that are pretty much everywhere one looks there.

That is when you start to learn how to truly, truly hate him.

 **Intuition.**

  
The period you spend living in Japan is synonymous to a prison sentence, full of long days in a country so different from Italy it’s upsetting, made worse by the fact that you’ve been made to go to school. The kids there are your age, only so much more retarded – you only like them after you’re done beating them up, because they quickly learn to leave you alone.

When you run out of children to destroy, you turn your new fangs – tonfa, your replacement for the sticks and the stones – on everyone else. By the time you reach the halfway point of your second year in Namimori, everyone’s afraid of you, right down to the leaders of the local gangs.

No one is your friend. Everyone is your enemy.

You have always liked things that way.

It’s in middle school that you meet them: the whelp Sawada Tsunayoshi, his ragtag team of friends, and Reborn, the fascinating baby that apparently guides them with a gun, a smart mouth and a heavy hand. Life, after their entrance, graduates from Somewhat Better than Being Dead to Almost Interesting.

‘Interesting’ is what you save for Rokudo Mukuro, the trickster.

‘Interesting’ is what you save for Dino Cavallone, the Bucking Horse.

And yet, even as you allow yourself to get crowded in by these not-quite-herbivores, even as you allow yourself to bend just enough to let Dino Cavallone train you to kill faster and better, the only thing that keeps you going is the slim possibility that maybe, back in Italy, it will occur to Byakuran that perhaps you are still alive, and perhaps it would be nice of him to send word or give you a call.

Nine out of ten times he doesn’t, but back then, you’re young enough to believe in anything, and stupid enough to believe in him.

By the end of high school there are no boundaries to your bitterness, and fortunately, there’s an envelope in the mail amidst the bills and the missives from social services. A flower’s pressed between the folds of the letter; the paper has nothing but two sentences.

 _Come home. You’re finished with that place, aren’t you?_

The last time you saw those fine lines and lazy whorls you did not even know how to read, but you could recognize that handwriting anywhere.

***

A day later, you’re in a car passing through familiar vineyards, then on your feet walking up the steps to the door of the Gesso State. As you pass through a labyrinth of hallways that you’ve memorized like the lines on your own hand, you know you’re being watched, but you are not surprised to see that he does not even look up to acknowledge you when you push the doors of his office open and walk right in.

Some things never change.

“Welcome home, _gattino_. How was the flight?”

“I have a name: use it. Slacking off, are you?”

“How cruel! I _did_ miss you, you know.”

Somehow, you doubt that, but you don’t ever tell him.

“Amadeo, right?”

“Kyouya. Kyouya Hibari.”

(The name you chose for yourself in Japan, because the name he gave you grates on your bones, writhes just under your skin.)

“So my kitten has become a skylark, hasn’t he?”

He is amused. Suddenly, you want to take your tonfa up and wipe that smile right off of his face.

“Come. Sit with me.”

“I would rather stand. Shouldn’t you be working?”

A light, easy laugh. “Actually, I was thinking about taking a nap… I didn’t think you’d need to see me so soon.”

You’re moving before you’re even aware of it, taking the heavy ring that hangs from your neck off of its chain and throwing it unto his desk, right over the papers scattered upon it.

The rays of sunlight streaming in from the picture windows catch on the violet insignia of the Vongola Cloud Guardian, in the lighter shades of Byakuran’s eyes.

“I do not need this, Amadeo.”

“It is not yours to begin with.”

“Are you asking for my permission to go then?”

“I don’t need your permission for anything.”

“…Oh?”

Your first attempt at playing his game, and you lose before you can even reveal your hand.

“I’m useless to you, aren’t I? Might as well make my own way.”

“Did I ever say you were useless?”

“You sent me away. Answer that for yourself.”

But he doesn’t answer the way you want him to – the way you expect him to. He watches you instead, smile fading just a tad bit as he rises, fingers curled about the chain from which your one ticket out of this place hangs from.

And it’s so terrible, because even if he’s walking towards you and even if the door’s right behind you, you don’t even think about moving.

He’s in front of you in a moment, leaning right into your personal space, one hand against the part of the door right next to your head and the other moving to turn the lock. He leans in further, invades your air just a little more to smile at you, to trace the edge of your jaw and the skin of your cheek with his fingers.

You could kill him now, but all you can think about are his eyes.

“You don’t want to go.” His voice is silk whispering over your ears. “If you did, then you wouldn’t have come home in the first place.”

His kiss, you realize, as he takes your lips for the first and certainly not the last time, is something you need like water in your lungs.

  
“My poor little skylark. I’ve pushed you too hard, haven’t I?” Long fingers cupping your chin, forcing you to look at him. It’s much the same as always, him directing you with slight movements of his hands, yet somehow it is different. Infinitely more invasive. Infinitely more dangerous.

“Should I tell you to stay? Should I tell you that I need you? What do you wish to hear?”

You want to taste his mouth again.

You want to run him through with a knife.

You don’t need to say any of this. He knows, because he lets out an odd little hum and smiles at you again.

“Let’s start again, Amadeo.”

His hand sliding under your shirt and skimming over your belly and chest is an invitation. You answer him by grabbing the back of his head by his hair and pushing his lips against yours.

***

You return to Japan a week later – the Vongola ring is still hanging from your neck, but it isn’t the only one that you keep there now, close to your chest.

You knew back then as much as you know now that he’s using you, that he never really looks at you or cares about how you feel, or what you want.

Back then, however, it was easier to pretend that it didn’t matter.

  


 **Holiday.**

  
It becomes a sort of a game in the years to follow, with you slipping from role to role with ease: Tenth Cloud Guardian of the Vongola Family, Sixth Funeral Wreath of the Millefiore, Head of the Foundation on Box Weapon Research. None of the roles are meant to intersect, but the fact that you answer to no one but Byakuran makes it all one in the same.

That, however, is your little secret. Your silent pact with him, written in your blood and sealed with a kiss from his lips, even if you may as well be the only one honoring it.

You tell yourself that you could live to enjoy this. It really isn’t so bad – you’re well kept, well fed, given your time out to fight whoever you want, whenever you want. You tell yourself that you chose this _for_ yourself, that it’s not really about him and more about getting your fix.

You tell yourself that you’re his knight, because it’s so much better than being his pawn.

  


***

“You’re up early, aren’t you?”

It’s the memory of how heavy his gaze feels when it’s directed between your shoulder blades that bring you a few years forward through the past, to a point where you’re twenty-three years old and standing under a showerhead, washing yourself clean. He’s followed the path you’ve left him, a trail of red footprints from the bloody hollow where you lay at his side to the shower stall. There’s no need to turn around to see his face. You know he’s smiling; you can hear it in his voice.

“Put some clothes on.”

“Why?”

When he joins you in the shower stall, you pull him in and he fits to the curves and angles of your body like he belongs there. When he kisses you, you pull away first, to press him against the glass wall of the stall and put him under the stream of the water.

You’re both hot and wet and hungry for the taste of each other’s skin and you realize, as you lick the salt off of his shoulder and shift your knee between his legs, that you want him just as much as you hate him.

***

“Almost ready, Amadeo?”

“Unfortunately.”

It’s straight to business after the fucking, of course, with him fiddling with the buckles of his uniform and you by the window sill, tossing your ring up and down, half-dressed and waiting for him to finish before you continue.

You’re an hour away from a meeting with the rest of the Millefiore, and you’re already wishing it was over.

“You are wasting your time with them.”

“Come now, what sort of commander would I be if I neglected the needs of my men, hmm?”

He comes over and you automatically reach out to tie in the last strap of his jacket, just as he adjusts the collar of yours. “Their role is just as important as yours is,” he murmurs, once you’ve both broken apart. “Now, shall we?”

“There is one difference between them and me that you are forgetting about,” you tell him later, as you’re walking through the eerie white corridors of the base.

“Yes, well. They don’t go to bed with me.”

“That is not what I meant.”

“What do you mean then?”

“They want to use you. If they cannot use you, they are going to want you dead.”

“And you would rather serve.”

“Only because it’s you.”

He doesn’t answer, only looks at you. At you, not through you.

Byakuran, your one and only, and this is just the third time that he’s really looked at you since the day you’ve met. You, on the other hand, you’ve watched him since the beginning, watched him so much and so well that you think you know him better than you know the back of your own hand.

He looks at you, measures you with his eyes and smiles.

Three times versus your infinity, and you’re still so young and so stupid, stupid enough to drop your gaze to your feet and walk through that door, without another word.

  


***

“I want to thank you, Hibari-san, for everything.”

Those words and Sawada Tsunayoshi’s smile, just before he told you all of his plans, mark the beginning of the end.

  


 **Mistakes.**

Thiry-six hours after you murder the Tenth Boss of the Vongola Family you’re six feet away from a blow to the stomach and a whole new world of pain. You’ll remember the whole ordeal in pieces; you’re not in the habit of thinking when you fight. Instead, you’ll recall sensations, and, just briefly, the exact shade and heat of the Dying Will flame.

Twelve hours after you murder the Tenth Boss of the Vongola Family you’re standing over a broken body, hearing the way death sounds when it’s wooshing in and out of someone’s lungs, seeing what it looks like when it’s bleeding out of someone’s body.

 _The others don’t know yet. This will be our secret._

 _You can still go back._

  
Because you’re not fighting you’ve started thinking again, and as such, every word rings clear, sharper to you now that they belong to the realm of memory than they were to you at the moment that you actually heard them.

Eight hours after you murder the Tenth Boss of the Vongola Family you’re in the back of a car, cut up on the film reel of the street lights as the driver (a greenhorn, too scared of you to breathe right or do anything beyond grip the wheel and take you where you need to go) brings you home. You’re good at smelling fear, and you should have reveled in it, but all you can think about is how it isn’t fair, how a dying man’s eyes could be clear enough to see through everything.

One hour after you murder the Tenth Boss of the Vongola Family you’re in the shower watching blood – his blood, and yours – stain white tiles and seep down the drain, only you’re not really seeing the blood, or the floor of the stall, or your own two feet. You’re a million miles away, back where you were hours before you even reached your bathroom, staring down at an auburn head matted with dirt and crimson.

It’s 3 AM somewhere in the past and you’re seated at your desk, lighted cigarette hanging from your lips – there are over thirty butts in the ashtray an arm’s reach from where you are, beside the medical kit that you have not opened yet. Fifteen cigarettes back you could still feel every blow, every injury you suffered at the hands of the now properly deceased Sawada Tsunayoshi.

This is where you start to doubt.

This is where you start wondering where it all went wrong.

“Congratulations,” Byakuran says. He’s in your room again; in your space, again.

“Just a little closer, aren’t we?” Byakuran remarks, and something about his smile makes you remember Sawada Tsunayoshi because they’re so different. They each wanted something from you that you just couldn’t give.

“What’s wrong, Amadeo? Tired?” Byakuran asks, and while his voice is concerned, his eyes are empty. Briefly, you remember how you felt before, when you were younger. You recall what bitter is supposed to taste like.

Suddenly, you know how it has to end.

  


 **Hush.**

  
You awake with a start, and you’re back to the present, back where you’re twenty-five years old, slumped against a wall, staring at bodies and quite possibly dying. Your cigarette’s burning itself out between your lips, and when you try and take another drag you end up coughing.

It hurts like a bitch, and because it hurts that much, you’re laughing.

  
Somewhere in the floors above where you are, there’s an explosion so strong that it rocks the whole building. Some shit breaks off from the ceiling and falls down, squishing some of the corpses like oranges, raining down on everything except you.

That must be the sound of those whelps from the Vongola finishing Byakuran off. The thought is so ludicrous, so perfectly right that you start laughing again, just after you finally managed to stop.

You’ve never laughed before, hardly even smiled. It makes you wonder if that is the reason why it’s suddenly so easy to do that stuff.

It occurs for you to ask the young Sawada Tsunayoshi himself, because he’s running through the door and coming towards you, but when you open your mouth it is blood that comes out, not sound.

“I told you I’d come back.”

Those are the last words that you ever hear.

 **Sunshine.**

  
“How is he?”

“Oh, Sawada-san!”

“Has he…? Oh. Right. Of course. I should… stop asking, huh?”

“Mm, well. Shouldn’t you be with the rest? You’ll all be leaving soon.”

“Spanner-san says that the machine isn’t ready yet.”

“You won’t be using the bazooka?”

“Reborn-san wants all of us to go together. We might get lost, see, now that things are changing.”

“Sounds fair. Say…”

“Mm?”

“What should we do, if he ever wakes up?”

“Keep him alive until he’s willing to live for himself.”

“Sawada-san…”

“Thank you for everything, Shouichi-san. We couldn’t have done it without you.”

A pause, a brief shift of brown eyes, and a small hand, warm and alive and rosy against the larger, pale one folded on the bed.

“Goodbye, Hibari-san.”


End file.
